Recursos > 2014

In Google’s relentless pursuit of organizing the world’s information, the most exciting shift we’ve seen over the last year is about its ability to understand the “meaning” behind content (via the Knowledge Graph) and queries (via its Hummingbird algorithm update).

In the past, Google had to rely on the words on the page, matching them to the words that someone searched on. Now, the revolution that is upon us is matching the intent of the query to the suitability of a page that matches that intent.

This has significant implications for SEOs; and, as I speak with some of the smartest SEOs in the world about this shift, one of the recurring themes seems to be a new appreciation for and focus on semantic SEO.

Smart marketers saw structured data markup as being an important part of their SEO strategy in 2012 and 2013. The trend and push around it has grown substantially — two out of three enterprises surveyed say they plan to make implementing or expanding structured data markup one of their top priorities for 2014 (Clarity Global SEO Conference, September 2013).

I find that when companies begin thinking about whether or not to spend the time and effort on implementing or expanding semantic markup, most of them hit a snag because they start with the following question.

Mitul Gandhi

Mitul Gandhi has had 10+ years of experience in marketing and SEO consulting with Fortune 500 brands, which is the basis for his innovative approach to SEO. As the Co-Founder and Chief Architect of seoClarity, he has patents pending in the field of SEO analysis, and has been quoted in leading industry news sources.

Katie McQuater of The Drum recently wrote, “As part of The Drum’s most recent Search supplement, a cross-section of experts from the search marketing industry give their predictions for the space in the year ahead.” McQuater starts with Caragh McKenna, Group Account Director of The Search Agency. McKenna states, “With the introduction of Hummingbird in September online marketers have been abuzz with conjecture on how it will affect site rankings and what it will mean as semantic search evolves to saturate organic search results. In reality semantic search has been merging into users search results over the past two years. Google has been tweaking it’s algorithm to increasingly use semantic and conversational cues to associate related results moving to more user friendly search results with less focus on the ‘primary keyword’.”